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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, philosophy and health care

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The Shrinking World of Ideas

By Arthur Krystal
The Chronicle Review
Originally posted November 21, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

For instance, psychologists and legal scholars, spurred by brain research and sophisticated brain-scanning techniques, have begun to reconsider ideas about volition. If all behavior has an electrochemical component, then in what sense—psychological, legal, moral—is a person responsible for his actions? Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen in a famous 2004 paper contend that neuroscience has put a new spin on free will and culpability: It "can help us see that all behavior is mechanical, that all behavior is produced by chains of physical events that ultimately reach back to forces beyond the agent’s control." Their hope is that the courts will ultimately discard blame-based punishment in favor of more "consequentialist approaches."

All this emphasis on the biological basis of human behavior is not to everyone’s liking. The British philosopher Roger Scruton, for one, takes exception to the notion that neuroscience can explain us to ourselves. He rejects the thought that the structure of the brain also structures the person, since an important distinction exists between an event in the brain and the behavior that follows. And, by the same token, the firing of neurons does not in a strictly causal sense account for identity, since a "person" is not identical to his or her physiological components.